"Education Matters" is the monthly newsletter of the Association of American Educators (AAE), an organization dedicated to advancing the American teaching profession through personal growth, professional development, teacher advocacy and protection. This issue of the newsletter includes: (1) The War on Progress: Why the National…

Poor countries need development programs that are both effective and cost-effective. To assess effectiveness, researchers are increasingly using randomized trials (or quasi-experimental methods that imitate randomized trials), which provide a clear picture of which outcomes are attributable to the program being evaluated. This "Policy Insight"…

We review what is known about Head Start's impacts on children and argue that the program is likely to generate benefits to participants and society as a whole that are larger than program costs. Our conclusions differ from those in some previous reviews because we use a more appropriate standard to judge program effectiveness (benefit-cost…

This report describes state efforts to carry out supplemental educational services (SES)requirements. It is the first in a series of CEP publications on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) implementation that will report on the results of 2006 surveys of officials from 50 state educational agencies, a national sample of school districts, and case…

This paper argues that young Hispanic (or Latina/o) children (ages 3 to 8 years) should be of particular interest to policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in education. Young Hispanic children constitute an urgent demographic imperative. Young Hispanic children are not only the largest racial/ethnic group in the U.S., but also the youngest…

More than 10 million children from birth through age six in the US live in low-income families. Although large investments in early childhood intervention programs are evident, is the field fully exploiting its potential to address the diverse needs of children and families? One means of addressing this question is to focus on the efficacy of…

The purpose of "Focus" is to provide coverage of poverty-related research, events, and issues, and to acquaint a large audience with the work of the Institute for Research on Poverty by means of short essays on selected pieces of research. This issue features articles drawn from four of the conference papers presented at the September 2007 IRP…

Using data from Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, this Data Note's issue examines developmental math referrals, attempts and completions from the 2002 Achieving the Dream student cohort over two academic years, fall 2002 through spring 2004. Although approximately half of the students who were referred to developmental math completed…

The "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 crystallized the concern for accountability in education. National testing was mandated as a way to improve the "broken" educational system. Publicly funded early education programs were not spared from such testing. While the positive effects of high-quality early education on children's…